NORTHERN PLANNER

The dentist

In the 1930s, with the world sliding into depression, John Maynard Keynes thought it would be splendid if if economists could one day be thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists.

Nearly a century later, Isabella Weber has picked up that daydream and given it teeth. Her new book, Anti-Fascist Economics, argues economists have profession have spent too long polishing models and too little time looking in people’s mouths. There’s too much economics stressing about ideology and prescribing the same treatment whatever the symptoms.

A dentist can’t do that. Nobody with an abscess wants a lecture on the theory of enamel.

If you’re a strategy person you might think she isn’t only talking about economists.

The onion

Most brands have one, or pyramids, temples, wheels. Each addressed to the person we wish we were selling to. People who think about butter on the bus. People who want to join a movement. People who never run out of money halfway through the month.

Beautiful characters who don’t exist

People assembled in a meeting room, or made up by ChatGPT. Weber’s stakes are far higher than ours. Her patient is democracy; ours is yoghurt or jam. But the illness is the same one. Start from the world you would like, and the real world will ignore you. Or begin to rebel.

The toothache

When you begin with the pain instead of the theory different things happen. Weber begins with the price of the things nobody can do without. Rent. Food. Heating. The bus fare. She says the far right isn’t winning because its specially convincing. It is winning while leaders and decision makers quoted statistics and talked about ‘growth people kept checking their bank balances and felt less and less in control of their own lives.

Just like the tracking  saying awareness is up two points, consideration is steady, and the brand is in rude health. Meanwhile, in an aisle in Wakefield, somebody picks up the product, turns it over, looks at the price and puts it back. The tracker measures what we decided to measure. The toothache measures itself.

And yet strategy (account planning) was born as an act of dentistry. In 1968, Stanley Pollitt at BMP and Stephen King at JWT came, separately, to the same conclusion: agencies needed someone whose whole job was to bring the actual person into the room. Not the target audience. The person. The job was (and should still be) a refusal to make things up.

The spanner

Weber deeply distrusts the economist’s romance with the silver bullet, the one grand model that explains everything. She would rather get into the nitty-gritty, because food doesn’t behave like energy, and energy doesn’t behave like housing. People never behave like an economist wants them to.

Strategy has silver bullets too, and tools masquerading as answers.  Purpose is a tool. Price is a tool. So is distribution, a cheaper pack size, a sonic trigger (it’s a bloody jingle).  We spent our time arguing brand against performance, long against short, purpose against product. Differentiation V Distinctiveness has become a min-cold war.

A cyclist halfway up climb doesn’t believe in any particular gear. He uses the one the gradient asks for, and changes it the moment the road does.

How Brands Grown was a breath of fresh air, but a then it became a religion. In fact it became a torch. Strap it to your forehead and it only ever lights the thing you were already looking for

The admission

Weber’s also the only people willing to stand up and admit that something is broken are the extremists. The mainstream offers paralysis. The fringe offers a door. People, unsurprisingly, walk towards the door.

Categories work the same way. They are not life changing (the most important bit) but each one has something everyone thinks doesn’t work but no one will admit.  The fees nobody understands. The pack that’s half air. The service without a phone number.  Whoever can say it first, plainly and without flinching, gets to own the fix.

All Marmite has done for years is admit that for many people, it tastes horrible. For Keep Walking, Johnnie Walker had to admit that for most people the idea of being financially successful had gone. I’m convinced a coffee brand could own the fact that for most, coffee is a way to get through the day without wanting to hit someone.

The attic

Most of Weber’s ideas are not new. Her answer to wild grain prices, in a market where four trading houses handle somewhere between 70 and 90 per cent of the world’s grain, is a public buffer stock that buys when grain is cheap and sells when it is dear. Keynes made the same case a hundred years ago. Her model for affordable food is Mexico’s canasta básica, where retailers agree to cap the price of a basket of around two dozen staples in return for tax breaks, and the government praises or shames them by name at a weekly press conference. When she wants proof that public ownership need not be a museum piece, she points at Switzerland, which never sold off its utilities and saw inflation peak at 2.8 per cent in 2022 while the OECD average hit 9.5.

None of was damascene revelation. It came from noticing what already works, somewhere, for someone, and asking why it couldn’t work here.

Our attics are full of the same stuff. The regional ad from 1987 that outsold the national one. The thing customers do with the product that the product team finds faintly embarrassing. The best strategic ideas are rarely invented. They are found, dusted off and carried downstairs.

I worked for a hair straightener brand that, in real life, helped millions of women feel in control of their lives, because they felt in control of their hair. It saw beyond the false dichotomy between a woman wanting to feel beautiful and wanting to feel capable. It forgot this and began to believe its customers were all models.

I also worked on a shower gel that was so intense you had to be careful washing your genitals with it. Fans loved the intense hit. Others hated it. But they were convinced they were the brand for mountain bikers and early sustainability adopters.

The mirror

In 1960, Volkswagen ran with Lemon. They never pretended the Beetle was glamorous. It was small and odd.

Fifty years later, shoppers liked Aldi’s prices, but they loved brands….and Aldi didn’t stock the ones they wanted. So they just put the brands on the table, right next to Aldi’s own, and let real people decide. You might remember Jean, who compared a box of PG Tips with Aldi’s tea and then announced she’d rather have a gin.

Aldi has now overtaken a couple of established UK Grocers. These brands would argue about trading updates, difficult conditions and so on. Both are supposed to be on the side of real people, it says so in their values. Aldi’s marketing director puts their success down to a refusal  to gloss over real life.

Monday morning

So what does dentistry look like on a wet Monday, when a brief drops into the inbox and the coffee hasn’t kicked in?

It starts before the brief is read properly, with a question about pain. What is actually hurting the people this brand is for, this month, at this price? Not what they say in groups, but what the till receipt says, and the half-empty basket, and the forum thread at two in the morning. Then comes a harder question, the one that stings a little: what do we believe about these people that we have never once checked? Somewhere in the answer is the thing everyone in the category knows and nobody says. Write it down in words your Mum would understand. Only then do you go looking for a tool, and you take whichever one relieves the ache, even if it isn’t the one you’re famous for.

The writers of the Oulipo in Paris, who spent decades composing novels under absurd rules, liked to describe themselves as rats building the maze they planned to escape from. They understood something planners forget: a constraint is not the enemy of an idea. It is where the idea lives. Reality is the finest constraint we have. It costs nothing, it is everywhere, and the competition keeps ignoring it.

The climb

Anyone who has ridden up really steep hill every map tells a small lie. The contour lines say one thing. Your legs say another, and your legs are right. Ideology is the map you drew at your desk. Reality is the gradient under the wheel, and it has never once read a powepoint deck.

The good rider doesn’t argue with the hill. She drops a gear, settles her shoulders, and climbs the hill that is actually there, not the one she was promised. It is slower than the daydream and a great deal less glamorous. It also gets you to the top.

Weber wrote her book because she believes democracy depends on economists learning this. Our stakes are smaller, and we should be honest about that. But the method travels from her world to ours without losing much on the way. Be humble. Be competent. Look in the right mouth.

Be more dentist.